Your sacral chakra houses the well of creative power and potential within you. Located in your lower abdomen just beneath the belly button, it’s the energetic womb space where desires are seeded, ideas are conceived, and creation takes place.
As your second chakra, the sacral is supported by the energy of the root chakra, where it expands upon our base survival instincts and needs into the realm of creation, feelings, and desires. The sacral chakra then funnels these urges and emotions into fuel for our solar plexus chakra, where all that creative energy can be taken action on and brought into form. The heart chakra also plays a special role in feeding your sacral well with desires, inspiration, and joy.
Associated with the water element, the sacral chakra is the regulator of your energy flow, your emotions, and the physical waters within your body (through the blood, kidneys, urinary and reproductive organs.) Your life force energy, sexual energy, creativity, passion, and pleasure all stem from this vital energy center in your body.
As an energy worker, when I’m performing a chakra healing treatment on someone, I often perceive their sacral chakra as a body of water of some sort. It might appear to me as a muddy swamp full of stagnant energy or unprocessed emotions. It might be like a dry lake bed, depleted of its life force energy with nothing to fill it back up. Sometimes I see an endless ocean full of waves and emotional instability. And at times, it feels like a dam of stifled emotion that’s about to break into a flood of rage.
These are all signs of a sacral chakra imbalance
If you have an overactive sacral chakra, it can take in too much emotional input and not be able to process it all.
This is very typical of people who identify as empaths or hypersensitive and tend to absorb a lot of emotional energy from the world around them.
It’s also common with over-givers and people who tend to take care of everyone else’s wants and needs before their own (fellow moms, I’m talking to you!) Your sacral chakra becomes flooded with emotional input, and the excess overflows into every area of your life, making you feel overwhelmed, heavy, and guilt-ridden, with big emotional waves that are hard to sort through.
If you have an underactive or blocked sacral chakra, this is when exhaustion and depletion occur, when you lose motivation, passion, and drive.
Your zest for life diminishes, your creative and sexual wells run dry, you don’t know what you want and feel in a constant state of lack, victimhood, or unworthiness.
This can happen often through our self-protection mechanism as a response to fear, shame, trauma, or emotional pain. In the moment of the painful experience, it’s helpful and natural for your sacral chakra to close down, so as not to take on all that emotional energy. But it if remains closed afterward, to protect you from feeling all the pain, it also closes the door on your passion, creativity, and life-force energy. This leaves you feeling blah, unenthused, uninspired, and riddled with shame or blame.
A balanced sacral chakra is like a fountain
There’s an endless source of fresh energy flowing into a contained pool of energy that you can draw from. This translates into clear emotional boundaries, a balance between serving yourself and others, and that amazing feeling of being in the flow. You’re able to receive more and give more, without guilt or depletion, because there’s always more energy coming back in.
With a balanced sacral chakra, you feel a genuine urge to create something- whether it’s a meal, a project, or a baby- plus the energy to actually fulfill those desires. You’re tapped into your gut intuition, your innate yeses and nos, and the truth of what you want for your life.
This is the beautiful role that the sacral chakra is here to play, to be the life-force energy that endlessly fills you up, and that you can use in your everyday life to find more flow, ease, purpose, and pleasure!
So how do you balance your sacral chakra?
Here are 5 practices you can do anytime you need to release emotions, restore your energy, and get that sacral chakra balance flowing again!
Sacral chakra clearing
Your sacral chakra is where you take in and store emotional information, so it’s a great daily practice to do an energetic clearing here. First, imagine a cord extending down from your root chakra, into the heart of the Earth. Breathe and rub the palm of one hand in a circular motion around your belly button while you say, out loud or in your mind, “I release any heavy, stagnant, and stuck energy from my sacral chakra. I release all energy that doesn’t belong to me. I release any emotions that are not mine to process.” Do this a few times as you envision the energy moving from your sacral chakra, down that grounding cord, and back into the Earth.
Sacral chakra crystals
Healing crystals are great aids for the chakra system to bring your energetic frequencies (aka thoughts, emotions, and sensations) back into balance. For a general guide, orange crystals help stimulate an underactive sacral chakra, fostering creativity, passion, and vitality, and moving stagnant, stuck energy. Blue crystals can help calm and soothe an overactive sacral chakra to bring balance to big emotional ups and downs. Black crystals can absorb heavy emotional energies and help you process and release them.
Emotional expression
The sacral chakra’s function is to feel, and this means feeling the entire range of human emotion. When we stuff down our guilt, shame, resentment, and rage they stay in our energy field and can become a sacral chakra blockage. But when you allow yourself to fully express the truth of your emotions, you move them out of your body! So grab your journal and write out your true feelings. Punch a pillow or rip up some junk mail as you rage out. Go for a drive and scream. Growl, moan, wail, cry! Do this alone, as a self-care practice. Allow yourself to express the truth, at least to yourself, and the emotions will transmute almost instantly.
Movement practices
Focus on moving your hips, lower back, and lower abdomen to get your sacral chakra energy flowing, release blockages, and restore your energetic vitality. You can try some sacral chakra yoga poses, like hip openers, forward bends, or pelvic floor exercises. Or jump, shake, kick and spaz out like a little kid, letting your inner child play. Dance around to your favorite music and shimmy those hips. Or tap into your sensuality by letting your body move and flow to its own rhythms and do whatever feels good.
Ask your sacral chakra
One of the best ways to help bring an unbalanced sacral chakra back into harmony is by giving yourself something that you truly desire. This is a practice of stepping into your sacral chakra’s wisdom and gut knowing by stopping to ask yourself, what do I want right now? What would bring me pleasure right now? What is one thing I can do for myself at this moment that would feel good? And then, go do it! It could be as simple as wanting a banana, or as complex as wanting to find a new relationship, but the answers are always available within you, and your job is simply to ask and listen.
I hope this helps you understand your sacral chakra energy better, how it feels in your body and how to help bring it into more balance in daily life. Use these practices to find more ease and flow in everyday life, unleash your creative potential, and honor that vital well of life force energy inside of you!
External Resources
Chakra Series – Svadhisthana: Sacral Chakra
7 Ways to Heal Your Sacral Chakra and Get Your Creative Juices Flowing Again
Sacral Chakra: Healing with Creative Source